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{ Monthly Archives } October 2004

How quickly the Left crumbles under the weight of repetition.

Mark Fiore, cartoonist and critic from the Left, lampoons the Bush administration in “OppositeLand” that “Inspections worked” and “Sanctions worked”. But one must ask, worked to achieve what? Inspections worked to make Hussein get rid of the weapons which we gave him the money to buy or supplied him with outright. He was our friend [...]

Development by accretion; Apple repeats NeXT’s error?

Jef Raskin, one of the big movers and shakers behind the MacOS graphical user interface, was interviewed by The Guardian. He notes that Apple develops “by accretion”, not fixing the old stuff but acquiring new stuff to throw on top of the old stuff (in the hopes you won’t notice the underlying broken stuff). This [...]

Bipartisan love for media corporations.

Looking at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center’s website, I came across a link to this cartoon. One of the bubbles (ostensibly read by a Sinclair corporation newsreader) reads “This program comes courtesy of a company that stands to profit handsomely from media consolidation efforts supported by the incumbent [President Bush].”. But history shows there is [...]

Common Dreams: 3 kinds of articles; Democrats: one kind of victory?

There are three kinds of articles on Common Dreams, a Progressive website which seems to consist largely of whole-hog copying of articles from a variety of sources: Pimp Kerry’s policies. There aren’t too many of these articles because you can’t polish a turd. Criticize Bush’s policies. There is a lot to work with here because [...]

Important movies

There aren’t that many movies that are good. Fewer still are important. Here’s my picks on the movies I think are important. The Corporation The movie asks “If corporations are legal persons, what kind of people are they?”. If there’s one big thing the movie doesn’t talk about, it’s corporate influence on political campaigns. On [...]

Why I don’t trust the Left

In no particular order: I fear that media exclusion will be endorsed, not challenged, by the Left. After Amy Goodman interviewed Larry Flynt she said she had received a large number of letters asking why she would interview him at all. Keeping Flynt off the air seemed to be more palatable than hearing the mix [...]

My posts to Slashdot.

My posts to Slashdot interest some. Perhaps they’ll interest you. Of course, posting to a forum you don’t control is risky. Your posts can be edited or hidden without your approval. But I do take e-mail seriously. So if you’d like to reply via e-mail and lose the publicity that comes with replying publicly, feel [...]

Strategic voting for people with little patience to think it through.

The “anybody but Bush” crowd is encouraging the Left to vote for Kerry to get Bush out of office. Some people I’ve talked to don’t seem to understand that this advice only really applies to voters in contested states. In Illinois, for instance, the state’s electoral votes will be decided by Chicago and Springfield areas [...]

Electoral awfulness

Notes on how to screw the public, in no particular order. Don’t give the voter a voter-verifiable paper ballot. Make them trust that the voting machine will store their vote accurately and count it according to the will of the voter. Make blind, paraplegic, and illiterate voters take someone in the voting booth with them. [...]

Municipalizing Wi-Fi the sleazy way.

The FDA now approves of implanting RFID chips in people. This removes a roadblock to widespread wireless net access by enabling a network of information resellers. Imagine this: there’s a bunch of people walking around with increasing numbers of RFID-tagged consumer goods (shoes, breast implants, currency, items they just bought at a store). There’s money [...]